The Olympic Games are known of and revered the world over. There are arguments about some of the events included now, there is serious concern about the size of the event but there is no one who is ignorant of the Olympic movement. There are remarkably few however who have ever heard of the Intercalated Games never mind know much about them. The 1904 Games had been held in St Louis, Missouri and spread over several months between 1st July and 23rd November. Overshadowed by the Russo-Japanese War and with difficulties in travelling to St Louis very few of the top athletes, other than American and Canadian, were present. These, the III Olympic Games were the first to be held outside Europe. The main addition to the format was the introduction of gold, silver and bronze medals for first, second and third places. The movement favouring the Intercalated Games had the intention of holding them everu four years midway between the original Olympics.
The 1906 Intercalated Games or 1906 Olympic Games were held from 22 April 1906 to 2 May 1906, and were an international multi-sport event celebrated in Athens, Greece. They were at the time considered to be Olympic Games and were referred to as the “Second International Olympic Games in Athens” by the International Olympic Committee. However, the medals that were distributed to the participants during these games were later not officially recognised by the IOC and are not displayed with the collection of Olympic medals at the Olympic Museum in Switzerland.
Lord Desborough, competed for Great Britain at these Games and won silver. He was Chairman of the International Olympic Committee and the British Olympic Association from 1905 – 1913 and played a significant part in the organisation of the 1908 Olympic Games held in London.
The Games are covered in the following article by Tom McNab. It is an informative piece but there is also a great deal about the meaning of ‘amateurism’ and what constituted an amateur – there are places where it raises an incredulous laugh from the reader. Read on.
Q 1906 is outside the four year Olympic cycle- why is that?
A As I explained before, the Greeks wished to keep the Olympic Games in Athens forever. De Coubertin ignored them at first, but the failure of the next two Olympics, in Paris and St. Louis, had given the Greeks the strength to suggest another series, 1906, 1910, 1914 etc, and they held what they planned to be the first of these in 1906.
Q And were they successful?
A Yes, relative to the Games of 1896, though the standards were similar to those of 1900 and 1904. They were now much more representative of world sport.
Q Are they now viewed as an official Games?
A They are covered in most histories and at the time they initially had a sort of semi-official status, if only because the IOC was still reeling after two failed Olympic Games. The Greeks had originally intended to hold them in 1901, and even de Coubertin could not have done much to prevent them from doing so. Politics intervened, and the Greeks were unable to hold them, and their 1906 Games were at one point to be given “Panhellenic” status by de Coubertin, though that seems to have come to nothing. Later, an IOC committee met to decide their status, and put them outside the Olympic definition.
The Panathinaikos Stadium in 1906
Q Did they introduce anything new?
A Yes, quite a lot. A march-past in teams, a closing ceremony, and an Olympic Village, based in the Zappeon, next to the Averoff Stadium.
Q Was the standard high?
A Much higher than in 1896, because of it was now more representative of world sport, but the track events were still hampered by the tight bends of the Averoff Stadium,( and runners ran clockwise) and the infield was narrow, dangerous for the long throws.
Q So the Games were not yet truly representative of world standards?
A No. They were still essentially the province of the upper classes, those with the time and the funds to attend. This meant East Coast American Ivy League students and Oxbridge, and their equivalents in other nations.
And there was not yet a fixed Olympic programme of sports, and even within sports like athletics there was as yet no agreed schedule. International governing bodies were still a decade away, and it was only then that there would be standard programmes of events in each sport.
Q And sport was unevenly developed throughout the world?
A It still is. But in those early years of the 20th century, the gaps were much bigger. Only a handful of nations had well-structured governing bodies, notably USA, Great Britain, Germany and the Scandinavian nations. Eastern Europe was poorly-developed, and Africa, South America, the Middle and Far East had not yet entered the world of sport in any coherent manner.
Q So this meant too that few nations had any capacity to hold an Olympic Games?
A Yes. Only Great Britain had any really strong traditions in holding big sports events, with gatherings like Wimbledon, Henley, Bisley and Ascot, but even the UK had no experience of holding a big multi-sport event like the Olympic Games.
Q So why was Rome chosen for the 1908 Games?
A That is a difficult question to answer, because Italy was not yet in the top division of sporting nations. As things turned out, in 1906, Vesuvius erupted, causing massive damage, the Italians withdrew, and Great Britain picked up the baton.
The finish of the Marathon
Q The issue of amateurism seems to have been important at that time, and it is difficult, at this distance, to see why so much importance was attached to it.
A That is quite understandable. It is an issue which will keep coming up as we move forward into the 20th century, so let me try to explain it.
First, the ancient Greeks had no word for “amateur”, simply because they did not divide the world of sport into categories such as amateur and professional. Their four Crown Games offered no money prizes, or prizes in kind, only wreaths of olives. This did not however prevent their city-states honouring victors with pensions, homes, even wives. But a network of festivals developed over the years in Greece, Italy and the Middle East, all offering prizes. These were sometimes money, and often prizes in kind, such as much-valued oil.
Q So the “amateur”is really a modern construct?
A Exactly. Sports of one kind or another existed all over the world, in a primitive form, at local level, but it was the English middle classes who in the second half of the 19th century codified and structured them. Earlier, public school headmasters such as Thring of Uppingham had deployed sport as a means of focussing pupils’ energies, of controlling them, and as a vehicle of education. When these boys moved on to Oxbridge, they re-created the sport of their youth in their colleges. And in the second half of the 19th century they began to create sports associations for adults.
Q That doesn’t quite explain the “amateur”.
A No, it does not. Initially, they hoped to keep the membership of their clubs to their own class. Sometimes they wished to go even further, and one writer even went as far as to express his distaste for athletes from the Midlands, even though they had come from a similar educational background as himself!
Q Their definition of a “club” might seems to have been an organisation which you tried to keep people out of !
A You are not far off. These first amateurs now appear to us as superannuated children. They drew the line at the acceptance of money for sport, and rationalised this by making the argument that a man who made his living out of sport had a clear advantage over one for whom it was merely a recreation.
Q That is a reasonable argument.
A It is. The problem was that in most sports there was no professional class, and by that I mean men for whom sport was a full-time occupation. There were exceptions, (such as boxing and wrestling), but few sports offered anything approaching a profession. But the first amateurs simply drew the line at competing for a cash prize.
Q What happened if you entered an event offering a cash prize and won nothing?
A You were still considered to be a professional.
Q But the amateurs, didn’t they compete for prizes?
A Yes, mostly in handicap events. Initially, medals were given, but the athletes protested that this was surely inappropriate for handicap events. So prizes were reluctantly given, but only those to which a steel plate could be stapled, indicating how and where it had been won.
Q Crazy.
A There is more. This requirement clearly limited the kind of prizes that could be offered, so the athletes again put in a protest, and it was removed.
Q What if you tried to sell your prize?
A That made you a professional.
Q What if you took it back to the shop and tried to replace it with something that you actually liked?
A Same again-that professionalised the athlete.
Q The line seems to have been drawn at acceptance of money.
A Yes, but more than that, at winning anything of value. Listen to this. “Prizes must be of a character which cannot be possessed or retained for the period of the life of the recipient.”
Q What year was that?
A As late as 1946, in the IAAF Handbook. You really could not make it up. Four whole pages are devoted to defining the amateur from every possible angle. It is, however, remarkable that this type of material was still in print as late as this.
Q What happened if you were a professional footballer, and wanted to take part in athletics?
A That was not possible. Professional status in one sport travelled across all sports. There were even heated debates on whether someone who was paid a few pence to chalk billiard cues should have amateur status in sport!
Q And teachers of physical education in schools?
A They automatically lost their amateur status. Mike Sweeney, the great American high jumper of the late 19th century, lost his the moment that he became a P. E. teacher. He could easily have won medals in the first three Olympic Games of the modern era.
Q When was this rule rescinded?
A After the Second World War.
Q It is difficult, at this distance, to make sense of all this.
A Agreed, but it is worth noting that de Coubertin’s first two Paris Conferences, in 1892 and 1894, centred on issues of amateur status. Remember that this was at the dawn of the creation of national governing bodies. Only in Great Britain was there any depth of experience in this area, and only in the Anglo-Saxon world was there a culture of cash-prize athletics and betting-based running-events. The former was essentially recreational, and indeed the Scottish Highland Games programme became the basis of American college athletics, and many of its athletes became its first coaches. The running-events ( pedestrianism), though sometimes prone to corruption, was also essentially recreational. The advent of amateur athletics placed all of these expressions of athletics, which had been the source of the modern sport, outside of the Olympic movement.
Q Wasn’t that a little short-sighted?
A At this distance, yes. In Great Britain, some sports like racing, cricket and football formed governing bodies that embraced all codes, but most sports simply drew a line at the acceptance of money, or competing against anyone who had done so.
Q What about the amateur administrators?
A That is a quite different story. From the outset, they were provided with what was called an “honorarium”, often sometimes close to what a working man might earn in a year.
Q Humbug.
A Pretty close, one law for the rich, another for the poor.
Q Did the early European sports administrators take their lead from us?
A Yes. These were early days, and European amateur administrators, who had a much shallower sports experience than ours, tended to take their lead from us at this point, simply because we had been first in the field.
Q Where did de Coubertin stand in all of this?
A The Baron was a pragmatist, Amateurism was the only game in town, and de Coubertin to go with the flow. Later, in his Memoirs, he revealed that he saw no virtue, no real logic, in amateurism.
Tom McNab, February 5th, 2016
Lord Desborough, a very enthusiastic outdoors man took part in many sports. Educated at Harrow and at Balliol College, Oxford, he was a ferocious fast bowler for the school and rowed for Oxford in the University boat race. He enjoyed swimming ( swam the Niagara Falls twice), rowed across the English Channel, climbed the Matterhorn by three different routes, and on a long holiday climbed the Matterhorn, Monte Rosa and the Weisshorn in just eight days total. There were many other feats that he achieved in the course of a very active sporting career.
At the time of the Intercalated Games he was a noted fencer who competed for Great Britain at these Games and won silver. Away from the competitive arena. as Chairman of the International Olympic Committee and the British Olympic Association from 1905 – 1913 he had offered London as a venue for and was responsible for having the of London Franco- British Exhibition switched from 1907 to 1908. They agreed, and as a result built the White City, holding 70,000, and the Games also featured the first (and last) 100m. swimming pool. This Olympics set the standard for all future Olympic Games. Under his chairmanship, this 1908 Games proved to be a great success.
The 1908 Games were originally scheduled to be held in Rome, but were relocated on financial grounds following the violent eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 1906, which claimed over 100 lives. These were the fourth chronological modern Summer Olympics in keeping with the now-accepted four-year cycle as opposed to the alternate four-year cycle of the proposed Intercalated Games.